User who crashed networks never asked for a fix

""I drove about 70,000 km in my first year, mostly visiting small customers, lugging PCs that were officially 'Novell servers,'" George told On Call. This was not pleasant work. George said plenty of jobs required him to enter dusty cupboards or crawl into cellars. One job involved "standing on a forklift above a fish-gutting production line." Wherever George was sent, he strung up cables and connected devices using BNC connectors, a 1940s-vintage connector that somehow survived into the early LAN age."

""One day, I was called to a customer to fix a malfunctioning network that was intermittently dropping connections," he told On Call. The network used coaxial cables and 10Base2 - a combination that meant a single bad connection would crash the whole network. George investigated by taking down parts of the network and looking for faults, but couldn't find the cause of the network outages, which persisted. There was nothing for it but to check every PC to make sure their LAN cables"

George studied history at university while spending time on computers and enrolled in an IT learn/work contract to become an SCO Unix administrator. He obtained certification but had little to do until he connected an SCO Unix box to a Novell 3.1 machine via TCP/IP, prompting reassignment as a Novell engineer. He logged about 70,000 km in his first year, visiting small customers and transporting machines labeled as Novell servers. He installed and wired systems in cramped, dirty environments using BNC connectors and routinely troubleshot fragile 10Base2 coaxial networks prone to single-point failures.

Read at Theregister